Bloggers, designers, illustrators, researchers, documentarians, historians, and media makers of all stripes now have a new online repository for nearly 100,000 free media assets with the launch of Pond5’s Public Domain Project.
A media marketplace (and Shutterstock competitor) used by over 100,000 outlets with millions of video clips, stock illustrations and photos, and hundreds of thousands of sound effects and music tracks, Pond5 raised $61 million in financing last year from Accel Partners and Stripe Group.
The company’s Public Domain Project includes 5,000 video clips that were digitized from the National Archives outside of Washington.
So if designers want to find clips like George Melies’ 1902 film, A Trip To The Moon without having to troll around on YouTube, they can.
As part of the digitization of the media assets, the library’s files all contain metadata so users can search for content by design features or aspects of the content’s production. Pond5 also said that they’d broken down footage sequences into individual shots. All of the content is shareable and embeddable in social media and through the web, the company said.
There are already repositories of public domain content available through rival sites like Shutterstock, or the National Archives in DC themselves, but it seems that the collection of material that Pond5 has amassed is one of the largest.
By all accounts, Pond5 has been doing quite well recently. The New York-based company saw revenues of $19 million in 2014, up from $12 million in 2013, and has relocated to 30,000 square feet of swanky new office space in Manhattan’s posh SoHo neighborhood. It’s also been on a bit of a hiring push, adding a VP of finance in October and looking for marketing and operations executives.
For designers in other countries, the company put together a brief primer on copyright law, to highlight that media available in the public domain in the U.S. isn’t necessarily categorized as public in other countries.
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